Dear Friends:
Kislev is the month
of Chanukah, and Chanukah is the holiday of Exile. Chanukah
occurs in the darkest season of the year and comes to remind
us that, in the midst of the darkness of our Exile there
is always the ability to kindle light, to overcome idol
worship, to bring purity to a world that is drowning in
materialism and falsehood.
My wife and I were
recently privileged to spend a week in the Pacific Northwest
and British Columbia on a speaking tour sponsored by the
Seattle Kollel and Torah Umesorah. It is always amazing to see
with our own eyes the return of our People to Torah in both
large cities and tiny hamlets around the world. We
ourselves were inspired; I believe our new friends in these
communities were also inspired.
We had a few hours
to ourselves between programs in Victoria, British Columbia. Our
host, Rabbi Shaya Greiniman, suggested we visit one of the
nearby provincial parks to see the salmon spawning. We
didn't really know what that meant, but we soon found out.
Vancouver Island,
where Victoria is located, lies at the very western end
of Canada, at the eastern end of the Pacific Ocean. From
its mountainous wilderness many streams find their way to the
sea, and in those streams salmon are born every year. These
salmon swim downstream into the ocean and then travel thousands
of miles from their birthplace, sometimes as far as Japan.
But at the end
of about four years, a remarkable thing happens: these
fish return, across the vast, trackless reaches of the
Pacific, thousands and thousands of miles... to where? To the
very stream, the exact spot they where were born years earlier! They
then literally fight their way upstream, sometimes battling
strong currents and rapids. At times they may even become
bloodied during the uphill struggle as they leap over rocks,
but something inside them inexorably beckons them home. There,
in their birthplace, eggs are laid and fertilized in the stream
beds. The parents, having returned to their ancestral
home from across the sea, then die, but a new generation
is born, only to return themselves to the same spot when
their time comes.
What a world G-d
has created!
That scene remained
in my mind. As I pondered the story, I realized it
is an incredible moshul, a parable and lesson for us, the
Children of Israel, that is appropriate to the season of Chanukah.
In Parshas Lech
Lecha, the Torah tells us how our Holy Nation was
formed when our Father Avram heard the voice of G-d calling
him to the Holy Land of Israel from a distant land. Today,
thousands of Avraham [1] Avinu's
children are hearing
G-d's voice calling us back to Torah, to the
Holy Land, calling us home.
Like our Father
Avraham's, our path home is often arduous, but we are honored
to be on the Homeward path. We often give up comfort;
we give up the "option" of eating whatever we want to eat,
of spending "Saturday" at the ball park or the mall, of living
life without restraint. We spend every waking minute
training ourselves in midos tovos, proper behavior,
total honesty, chessed, friendliness and kindness
to our brothers and sisters as well as our non-Jewish neighbors. We
train our tongues not to slander and our mouths to speak pleasant
and proper language. We train ourselves to speak
to G-d and to be aware that G-d is constantly speaking
to us.
In other words,
we are constantly swimming upstream, against the current. We
are fighting every second against all the tendencies both within
ourselves and in the world around us which would otherwise
catch us in their current and pull us downstream into the vast
churning ocean of the allurements of the material world, where
we would otherwise be lost in an endless, trackless sea. We
hear G-d's call sometimes from continents away, sometimes worlds
away, and we respond, exerting the greatest efforts to return
to Him from the "four corners of the earth."
And as we struggle
higher and higher toward the Torah, the Presence of G-d, we
become fertile; we give birth not only to beautiful Torah-imbued
children but to the spiritual blessings through which the entire
world is sustained, fulfilling the promise which G-d made to
our Father Avram [2] when
He first summoned him to his great calling so many thousand
years ago: "all the families of the earth shall bless themselves
by you." [3]
This is where the
analogy with the salmon ends, because at this point they,
being creatures only of flesh and blood, end their lives. But
when we, the Children of Israel, return home this is where
we enter into Eternal Life. We infuse This World with
sanctity and in our own lives bond with Eternal Existence. We
bring light into the dark world in the same way that the
Chanukkah lights pierce the blackness.
May we all successfully
fight our way through this world and see very soon in our
days the fulfillment of our long journey Home! On
that day our long uphill struggle will be over as we
enjoy forever the Light of Torah and the perfect world
of Moshiach ben Dovid!
Roy S. Neuberger
